Build location-based games or apps with the newly launched WRLD SDK for Unity

We are excited to announce the launch of WRLD SDK for Unity, so you can build worlds in Unity using streaming, geo-spatially accurate 3D mapping for your next location-based game, project, or virtual or augmented reality application.

WRLD provides a fully textured 3D environment using a real-world global coordinate system so it’s ready to use instantly – no need to build a 3D environment or import any additional GIS data. Create custom styles and use the Unity tool to select the data layers you want – roads, buildings, trees, labels, etc.

We hope this new feature allows developers to create experiences that allow them to explore the world from a total new perspective.

WRLD’s mapping platform will take you from a view of the Earth to a seat at your desk.

Explore the WRLD SDK for Unity API and examples here. Structure of the WRLD Package includes:

Demo: Contains demo scripts and scenes which are easy to attach / modify

API: Includes a base script WrldMap which interacts with and sets up the WRLD plugins for use

Editor: Editor scripts to simplify setting and changing values within the Unity Editor

Plugins: Includes plugins for all available platforms

Resources: A simple set of materials, semantically named and assigned to meshes when resources are streamed

Scene: Featured startup scenes showcasing separate behavior in each world space

Scripts: Types and Unity MonoBehaviour scripts that help running the app and provide simple abstractions for use

Textures: A set of textures utilized by the materials mentioned above and easily modifiable

The limitations are only bound by your imagination. To get started you’ll need to create a WRLD API Key and download the SDK through the Unity Asset Store.

Please reach out to the WRLD team directly at support@wrld3d.com or on Twitter @WRLD3D with any questions or a link to share your project.

The WRLD team is on standby to receive your feedback and looking forward to seeing what experiences they can help you build.

This blog was written in conjunction with John Bell, Senior Software Engineer at WRLD.

Hi Prakesh,
Thanks for trying out our maps! Right now we are working on building out coverage, and we prioritize based on area requests. As we don’t have Nepal currently on our maps, this has been noted. Please do let us know how else we can help you – support@wrld3d.com, or on twitter @wrld3d.

Couldn’t seem to get this to render the buildings and such where I live. I live in a smaller city in the states and while trees and roads were rendered, none of the buildings were. Also things aren’t consistent. In the starting location that was in the demo scene, some buildings showed a hotel sign on it for example and then as I zoomed in or out, the sign would appear or vanish.

Roads also vanished when looking down on them, even when zoomed in closer to the ground.

There is some potential here and I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes and hopefully there are more examples to work with so I can see what I can do with this. But I’m not sure if this will give me the results we were looking for with a future work project.

Your area requests have been noted! Stay tuned to see when we expand our coverage.

It’s not currently possible to use our Unity maps offline. Our Unity SDK does cache, but requires internet connectivity in the first instance to obtain the data to populate the cache. This is something we’re getting a lot of request for so I expect we’ll be exploring adding this to our Unity SDK as soon as we can.

This look like best mapping option I have seen yet. However it also seems only the US and Great Brittain have been mapped out completely. When will the whole world be mapped out? For instance I live in Amsterdam and if I use my coordinates I just get endless sea. I’m trying to find out what the best option is for my game, mapbox, wrld, mapzen, open street map, google, bing, apple or any of the other sources. This has the nicest visualisation but if it’s not available in the Netherlands it will be useless for me.

We don’t currently have Netherlands mapped in our Unity SDK. When deciding which area to map next, we take any requests from developers like yourself into consideration – your interest in Netherlands has been noted!

For anyone that is curious about using it with ARKit our team found this issue and logged it: —–At the moment the Unity API relies on a static library, “libStreamAlpha”. This dependency is not compatible with iOS applications compiled with the “Enable Bitcode” flag set.

This causes compatibility issues with iOS 11 and ARKit, which require applications to be built with bitcode enabled.

Hi Sonny, our email has been set on fire! If you follow us on Twitter and DM us your email we’ll manually activate you so you can start using right away! Or feel free to email us your info support@wrld3d.com. Thanks and look forward to seeing what you build!

Hi there, our email has been set on fire! If you follow us on Twitter @wrld3d and DM us your email we’ll manually activate you so you can start using right away! Or feel free to email us your info support@wrld3d.com. Thanks and look forward to seeing what you build!

Hey there, thanks for trying out WRLD! Please make sure you created an API key and didn’t use your developer token – they’re different, apologies for any confusion. If you need further assistance we’re here to help – support@wrld3d.com or follow us on twitter @wrld3d.

Awesome tool! But “global coverage” term in WRLD website doesn’t seem to be accurate. Try europe (germany, berlin for example) – it is all ocean. Sadly there is no info about it anywhere on the WRLD website or facebook page. I am quite dissapointed.

Hi there, thanks for your interest in WRLD! When deciding which area to map next, we take any requests from developers like yourself into consideration – your interest in the wider Germany area has been noted! We are also open to discussing commercial opportunities in order to get preferred areas mapped quicker. Feel free to email us at support@wrld3d.com with your request.

WRLD has dependencies to more than 20 other libraries/dlls’s. I’d not only have to deal with bugs in Unity and WRLD, but then with many other libraries that can cause issues too. I consider it too risky to integrate into something other than a hobby- or test-project.

The pricing details are on Wrld’s website – since it’s all about streaming from their servers, they charge based on the number of users per month. It’s free for the first 1000 users per month, after that they start charging a monthly fee.